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Message to the Commander-in-Chief: This is your Cuban missile crisis. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For U.S. citizens concerned about their nation’s fate, the New York Times packed some particularly depressing news yesterday: although Obama administration officials have long had the goods on Chinese economic espionage, they are afraid to say so.

As the Times's David E. Sanger reported, the administration has circulated an analysis detailing Chinese cyber attacks on corporate America but has withheld the one fact that matters: most of the attacks can be traced back to a district in Shanghai where the Chinese military’s cyber-command is based.

Why can’t the Obama administration call a spade a spade? As explained by one anonymous U.S. intelligence official, the administration is worried about hurting the Beijing Poliburo's feelings! He commented: “We were told that directly embarrassing the Chinese would backfire. It would only make them more defensive, and more nationalistic.”

Nonsense! This is a bit like not challenging a pickpocket because the poor fellow might get huffy. Sanger's report is the clearest possible evidence of what some East Asia watchers have long suspected: that Washington is full of appeasers who lack the intestinal fortitude to stand up to Beijing.

This is spinelessness on a scale not seen since British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich moment in 1938. Declaring that he had achieved “peace for our time” (a phrase often misquoted as “peace in our time”), Chamberlain was convinced that Hitler would be satisfied with the annexation of the so-called Sudetenland and would not push further. Czechoslovakia followed six months later and Poland within a year.

The idea that pussyfooting will impress Beijing is self-evidently ludicrous. Anyone who knows East Asia (I claim some knowledge after 27 years on the spot) knows that, in common with most human beings, Chinese leaders respect strength, not weakness. By treating their feelings like a piece of priceless porcelain, Washington is just asking for ever more outrageous Chinese infringements of American sovereignty. Certainly in former times when Washington was franker about expressing its displeasure, Chinese officials thought twice about pushing America around.

Obama and his top officials seem to be listening to the wrong advisers – advisers who are increasingly obviously intent on furthering China’s interests over America’s. There is nothing new here. Many of the top “China hands” in American think-tanks and universities who advised Bill Clinton on the sell-out deal that gave China permanent normal trade relations in the late 1990s were clearly in Beijing’s pocket. That is why their praises were sung by the Washington trade lobby. The lobby needed to get the deal done and, if that meant burnishing the reputations of obvious stooges and quislings, so be it.

The extraordinary thing is how blatant China’s government-sponsored cyberspying has now become. When Coca-Cola, for instance, planned to take over a local Chinese soft drinks company a few years ago, Chinese hackers were discovered to have accessed top-secret memos on how much the Americans were willing to pay. Perhaps most humiliatingly, even America’s most sophisticated tech companies, not least Google and Apple, have had their defenses breached. Recently even the computers of the New York Times and the Washington Post have been targeted. As the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has pointed out, Beijing is now in possession of all sorts of embarrassing and even compromising information about the personal lives of countless top American journalists.

The message for Barack Obama is that it is past time to get Beijing's attention. This is the cyber equivalent of a Cuban missile crisis and Obama has to decide whether he is a man or a mouse.